He had immense talent, extraordinary lucidity, and a strong personality. She had a passionate temperament, who wanted to live and not just be a writer. Despite adoring her mother and brother Leslie, at the age of only twenty she left the New Zealand of her birth forever to arrive in London, the heart of the British Empire. He had some loves and many were a great disappointment. He wrote until tuberculosis left him no energy, as did Anton Chekhov, his favorite Russian writer.
Kathleen Beauchamp Mansfield, known as
Katherine mansfield, was born on October 14, 1888 in Wellington (New Zealand), and died in Fontainebleau, near Paris, on January 9, 1923, at the age of 34. His father was a wealthy businessman, his mother “
a delicious and perfect being in the highest degree: something between a star and a flower“, as she wrote herself in a letter, (and which perhaps also portrayed in the evanescent
Linda Burnell of his story “
Prelude“).
He moved to England in 1903 to finish his studies at Queen’s College, London, also spending long periods in France and Germany. After an unfortunate first marriage (in 1909 to a tenor surnamed Bowdeen, which split on the same wedding day), in 1918 she married the critic John Middleton Murry whom she had met seven years earlier. It was he who was responsible for the post-mortem publication of the “Diaries” Y “Cards“from the writer, fundamental and extraordinary testimony of the artist’s personality, true literary masterpieces that are beyond mere biographical curiosity.
In 1915 tragedy touched the sensitive Katherine, when she lost her brother in the war and her subsequent emotional breakdown greatly concerned her friends and family. A year later he seemed to recover, entered the world of the more refined intelligentsia, and met Virginia Woolf, the philosopher Bertrand Russell, and the immense writer DH Lawrence. Woolf would recognize in his personal diaries, some jealousy towards the friend and included a certain envy, but was never dominated by bitterness towards the talent of Katherine and, in fact, it helped her to publish numerous works in her prestigious publisher, the famous Hogarth Press. Thanks to her, many of the stories with which Mansfield earned his reputation.
In 1917 Mansfield was diagnosed with tuberculosis, thus beginning a path between various European sanatoriums, between doctors and trials of new treatments. In October 1922, the writer tried the last treatment at the “Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man”, founded by the Russian George Gurdeijeff, according to some a real spiritual leader, according to others, a charlatan.
A French noblewoman had donated to the Russian a castle in the beautiful forest of Fontainebleau, which was once the hunting and hospitality of the “Sun King” Louis XIV. The cure aimed to discover the true “me” of the sick through contact with nature, music, dance and more.
There was nothing to do and Katherine mansfield he died less than three months later, on October 9, 1923, shortly before his 35th birthday.
In 1945 the complete edition of his stories was published, which critics did not tire of praising. Together with Virginia Woolf and James Joyce this sensitive New Zealander revolutionized English literature, writing stories often set in a very short space of time and in closed places, using frequent flashbacks of cinematic stimulus; stories in which a single phrase or a small gesture was full of great and deep meaning.